TY  - JOUR
A1  - Koster, Arie
A1  - Scheidweiler, Robert
A1  - Tieves, Martin
T1  - A flow based pruning scheme for enumerative equitable coloring algorithms
JF  - A  flow based pruning scheme for enumerative equitable coloring algorithms
N2  - An equitable graph coloring is a proper vertex coloring of a graph G where the sizes of the color classes differ by at most one. The equitable chromatic number is the smallest number k such that G admits such equitable k-coloring. We focus on enumerative algorithms for the computation of the equitable coloring number and propose a general scheme to derive pruning rules for them: We show how the extendability of a partial coloring into an equitable coloring can be modeled via network flows. Thus, we obtain pruning rules which can be checked via flow algorithms. Computational experiments show that the search tree of enumerative algorithms can be significantly reduced in size by these rules and, in most instances, such naive approach even yields a faster algorithm. Moreover, the stability, i.e., the number of solved instances within a given time limit, is greatly improved.
Since the execution of flow algorithms at each node of a search tree is time consuming, we derive arithmetic pruning rules (generalized Hall-conditions) from the network model. Adding these rules to an enumerative algorithm yields an even larger runtime improvement.
Y1  - 2016
U6  - http://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1607.08754
N1  - Lehrstuhl II für Mathematik, RWTH Aachen University
SP  - 1
EP  - 30
ER  -